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Implications of an Exemplar-Theoretic Model of Phoneme Genesis: A Velar Palatalization Case Study.

Diachronic velar palatalization is taken as the case study for modeling the emergence of a new phoneme category. The spread of a palatalized variant through the lexicon is treated as a stochastic classification task for the listener/learner. The model combines two measures of similarity to determine...

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Published in:Language & Speech Vol. 57; no. 1; pp. 3 - 42
Main Author: Morley, Rebecca L
Format: case study research tables/charts Journal Article
Published: Sage Publications Inc. Mar2014
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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      dt: Mar2014
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      pub: Sage Publications Inc.
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        atl: Implications of an Exemplar-Theoretic Model of Phoneme Genesis: A Velar Palatalization Case Study.
      aug:
        au: Morley, Rebecca L
        affil: The Ohio State University, USA
      sug:
        subj:
          Vocabulary
          Phonetics
          Speech Acoustics Evaluation
          Theory
          Palate Physiology
          Human
          Computer Simulation Utilization
          Case Studies
          Vowels
          Grammar
          Word Lists
          Accents and Dialects Classification
          Variance Analysis
          Phonology
          Speech Perception
          Analytic Research
      ab: Diachronic velar palatalization is taken as the case study for modeling the emergence of a new phoneme category. The spread of a palatalized variant through the lexicon is treated as a stochastic classification task for the listener/learner. The model combines two measures of similarity to determine classification within an exemplar-theoretic framework: acoustic distance and phonotactic expectation. There are three model outcomes: contrast, allophony, or contextual neutralization between the plain and palatalized velars. It is shown, through a series of simulations, that these can be predicted from the distribution of sounds within the pre-change lexicons, namely, the ratio of the /k-vowel/ sequences containing naturally palatalizing vowels (i, ɪ, e), to those containing non-palatalizers. “Unnatural” phonotactic associations can arise in individual lexicons, but are sharply limited due to the large size of the lexicon and the local nature of the phoneme changes. “Anti-natural” distributions, which categorically violate the proposed implicational relationship between palatalization and frontness/height, are absent. This work provides an explicit and restrictive model of phoneme change. The results also serve as an existence proof for an outcome-blind mechanism of avoiding over-generation.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype:
        case study
        research
        tables/charts
        Journal Article
      ougenre: Article
    language: English
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